How To: Make Moonshine

Add sugar

Add the sugar and yeast to the warm mash. If you yell “BAM” while adding any of these ingredients, immediately drive to the highest bridge in your city and throw yourself off of it. Or eat five heaping spoonfuls of mash — it’s your call, Emeril.

Let the mash ferment

Set the mash aside in a cool, dark room and allow it to ferment for four to five days. These will be four to five days filled with conversations like, “Oh that? It’s a science project I’m doing with my nephew,” or “What, you think I’m making moonshine or something?”

The mash is ready when it stops bubbling. At this stage, it is technically known as sour mash. Unless you are suicidal or lack taste buds, you’ll probably just want to take our word on the “sour” part.

Put the sour mash in the pressure cooker

Put this newly fermented sour mash into the pressure cooker and carefully bring it up to exactly 173 degrees Fahrenheit. This is the temperature at which the alcohol molecules in the mixture wake up from a boozy stupor, rub their little bloodshot eyes and slowly rise to the surface.

Fasten the copper pipes to the pressure cooker

You’ll need a bit of your MacGyver-savvy here. Affix the coiled copper pipe to the vent of the pressure cooker. Run most of the copper coils through cold water and place the opposite end into a separate clean container. As the vapors pass through the cold copper tubing, they condense into a clear, pungent liquid. Some call it white lightning or mountain dew or even rotgut, but you can call it what it really is — moonshine.

Filter it through charcoal

OK, it’s not quite moonshine yet. Filter the quasi-moonshine through charcoal a few times to remove grit, impurities and hair. Then, dispense it into Mason jars for the full moonshine effect and enjoy — if you really can enjoy a shudder-inducing bit of nastiness, that is.

over the moon

If you’ve done everything correctly, the recipe should have yielded about two gallons of moonshine. If you’ve messed up, you’ll either go blind, die a slow, bleeding-out-of-strange-places kind of death or feel like you’ve wasted an incredible amount of time and cornmeal. Of course, you could also just walk down to the Booze Barn to buy a gallon of Jack Daniels in about 10 minutes and not have to worry about poisoning yourself. But where would this country be if everybody just did the smart, practical thing?